


The Blue Chronicle

by Beleriandings



Category: Old Kingdom - Garth Nix, The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: But Not In The Usual Way, Crossover, Gen, Journals, Magical Conservation, Offscreen academic fights, The Great Library of the Clayr, The Stolen Century
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-29
Updated: 2019-05-29
Packaged: 2020-03-29 12:00:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19019494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beleriandings/pseuds/Beleriandings
Summary: Lirael is only a second assistant librarian, so of course she is forbidden from accessing the oldest and most precious book in the Library, a mysterious historical text of unknown provenance and dubious authenticity, known as the Blue Chronicle.Fortunately, she's not one to be turned back by a locked door.





	The Blue Chronicle

The Blue Chronicle was the oldest in the Great Library of the Clayr, and that was saying something. Lirael hadn’t even seen it herself, as it was precious enough that it was always always under lock and key. It was kept in a dimly-lit, airtight room kept at the same temperature and humidity by a sea of Charter magic, suffusing the air. She had heard about what it contained, of course; most of the junior librarians knew a little, infamous as this book was, though none had read it, of course. A mysterious and certainly apocryphal account of the making of the Charter, she had heard. It was occasionally visited by scholars from Belisaere, as well as the occasional conservator mage checking for the slightest hint of mildew to its precious, ancient pages, and even they always worked under the vigilant eye of the Chief Librarian.

When Lirael had first heard of the Blue Chronicle’s existence, she had – naturally - read up on it, and many analyses of its contents existed, each more conspiracy theory-heavy than the last. There was a theory that within it was a coded message, and that the actual text itself was meaningless. There was speculation that it was a vision experienced by some ancient Clayr, prophesying the end of the world. There was endless academic bickering over its true age and provenance, enough to fill books many times as long. Once, Lirael read, two scholars had duelled to the death over whether or not it was a clever modern forgery.

So of course the door it was kept behind was a source of endless frustration for her. But locked doors had only stopped her for the first few years she had worked here; now, she could go just about anywhere she wanted, and the book intrigued her too much to stay away.

And so, one night – with the Disreputable Dog patrolling outside in the corridor – she used her adapted key bracelet to slip open the door and quitely let herself into the chamber where the Blue Chronicle was housed, all on its own on a stand in the center of the room. Barely breathing, she donned her clean white linen gloves and began to carefully – ever so carefully – turn the ancient pages. The blue linen binding was faded but still remarkably bright thanks to much careful conservation, the meticulous application of mending Charter marks over many centuries, by the hands of Clayr whose names were long forgotten.

It had once been embossed with decorative flourishes of silver leaf on the spine and at the corners, a little of which still clung to it. The fact delighted Lirael, but she resisted the urge to run her fingers down the cover. It was too delicate.

It was a journal of some kind, she realised as she began to read. Or perhaps some kind of ship’s log. Large sections were missing or illegible, as the book had been scorched by fire and had pages torn out, and parts of it had mouldered away irreparably long before it reached the careful hands of the librarians.

As it happened, she read all night, only leaving when she heard the clock in the reading room chime the morning. It what she had heard – an account of the making of the Charter, but the most unconventional one she had ever come across. For a start – and this she hadn’t expected – it was written by someone who claimed to have been there at the time, a person named Lucretia who seemed to be acting as some sort of chronicler for the crew of a vessel of some sort, though what sort she could not quite understand, due to several passages rendered unintelligible by water damage. She assumed that it was an ongoing account; many references were made to earlier volumes, and her fingers itched to open their covers, though of course they were lost to time.

But the book didn’t only speak of its writer; it also made reference to six other people, with names equally strange to her – Merle, Lup, Taako, Davenport, Barry, Magnus, and Lucretia herself. She said the names to herself, trying to pronounce them; they sounded foreign, most of them, or perhaps just very very old, originating from a language long forgotten.

But from the words on the page alone, she felt like she knew them. She had not expected that; she had expected something dry, but there were touches of humour, vivid description, even of things she could not imagine. And the people; they were not just historical figures, not in the sense that she was used to. The way that they were described, they felt…well, _alive_.

And there were seven of them. She could see why the scholars often interpreted this book as a metaphorical representation of the weaving of the Charter. The song she had learned long ago, about the Shiners, sounded in her head as she read the words. The book spoke of a quest, of sorts; they were going after something called the Light, which was the source of all creation. Encapsulating life, and the world, creating order out of chaos, shaping things from the raw material of existence. The Charter was never mentioned directly, of course – perhaps this Light was their name for it, she thought, whenever this was written – but she understood why this was the standard interpretation of this extremely unorthodox text.

It was hard to imagine what else it _could_ mean, short of being complete fiction. But it didn’t have the feel of fiction; it felt real, it felt like the writings of someone driven forward by the compulsion to record her reality while she could, in prose so detailed and lucid that it would be understood for aeons to come, in worlds and by minds different than her own.

For all this, though, the one thing that Lirael didn’t wholly understand was the mentions of the Hunger – a force for destruction, that wanted to destroy (perhaps?) the Light, or consume it. But the seven of them – with the help of an eighth, someone called Fisher, who seemed to be a different sort of being to the others though linked to them in some way – were trying to safeguard the Light, so that the Hunger would spare this world.

This part she didn’t understand, and it made her mind spin to even try to think of it; what kind of power could devour and destroy whole worlds, leaving only swirling, chaotic void in its wake? What kind of force of cosmic destruction would even want to? It made her feel a little sick to think about, and she closed the book at that place, blinking in the light as she came back to herself after reading for hours.

She came back though, the next night that it was safe to. And the next, until she had finished the book and read it over a second time, closing the covers with a strange feeling of something missing.  

The last few pages were blank. Clearly, Lucretia had lost the journal, or something had happened to her; the last few pages mentioned a dangerous mission to obtain the Light, to prevent the Hunger from destroying everything. But it didn’t say how it had ended.

Well, clearly it had ended in success, Lirael thought later, furrowing her brow as she straightened her waistcoat, tying up her hair in its slipping headscarf to tidy herself up a little for the day after her lost night of sleep. Otherwise – assuming the account was true, which she _had_ been assuming, she realised, since quite early on – there would be no librarians to read it, no world, no her. Only chaos and black void.

She shivered, wondering again what had happened to Lucretia, keeper of all their memories; Lirael felt like she knew her, but she didn’t know how her story ended. Had she sacrificed herself, taking all the responsibility on her own shoulders and being destroyed by it? Had she died, or did she get away? If she did, did she write down her lost words again, on new pages, filling in the gaps in the story with the painstaking attention to detail that characterised the rest of the account?

Lirael had no way of knowing. She tried questioning the Dog – especially about entities like the one referred to as the Hunger, that might have once destroyed the world, because she felt like that would be something the Dog might know about – but she was oddly cagey about the whole thing, even more so than usual when the world’s deep past was mentioned.

As the days stretched into weeks and months with no answers to her questions, it slipped to the back of Lirael’s mind.

But she never quite forgot it entirely, and would remember it for all the years to come.

And one day, many decades later, she came back to the room with the Dark Mirror in one hand, her bandolier of bells across her chest.

“All right” she whispered, laying her other hand very gently on the cover of the Blue Chronicle. “Time to learn the ending of the story.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm taking fic requests on tumblr, to celebrate 1000 followers there!! This one was a gift for @mirandatam, who asked for an AU where the Seven Birds are the Seven Bright Shiners, and I...sort of stayed within that remit? I guess? It did end up going in a bit of a weird direction, but I kind of like the way it ended up.  
> Also I'm 100% sure the IPRE crew inspired wild conspiracy theories absolutely everywhere they went


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